Preliminary Concerns

Target Group

Re-use of tutorial information

Approximately 50% of this page has been copied from the tutorial. This page is provided to give you an extremely quick start without bells and whistles. If you have read the tutorial there is, besides the cartridge itself, most likely no new information on this page for you. If you have not yet consulted the tutorial and if you want to know more, start to use the tutorial.

Required File Download

This quick start is based on the cartridge FirstAdventure that you can download here (right click and save link as…). Save the txt file to a folder on your computer. You will need it in a few minutes.

The Wherigo Concept

The basic concept of a Wherigo cartridge is the creation of zones on a map.

In the above example 6 zones are created on the map and the human player (black) is walking from zone to zone to solve the cartridge. You can see that some zones are already visible to the human player (they are marked in green), other zones (marked in orange) are still hidden from the human player.

The human player can use his GPS, Smartphone or PDA to navigate to a visible (green) zone. Our human player is currently on the way to zone 3. This zone might contain a puzzle, an interaction or a clue that activates zone 4.

Zone 4 will then enable zone 5 and the player can continue his quest. Once zone 5 is visible, the human player can locate it on his screen and walk towards it. He navigates from zone to zone until he reaches his final target (zone 6). This is where the cartridge depicted above will end.

Your first cartridge that I have prepared for you will only have 4 zones.

Restoring the cartridge

After you click on the Manage Cartridges link, you'll be presented with a powerful and possibly slightly intimidating form. This is the main form for doing things related to cartridges such as creating, deleting, loading, compiling, backing up, etc. For our purposes, we're only interested in a couple of the options.

In the “Operation” drop down box, select Restore

Use the Browse button to locate the previously downloaded file “cartFirstAdventure.txt” on your computer

Click the Submit button to send your request to the server

The cartridge FirstAdventure is now in your list of cartridges

Testing the cartridge (Emulator)

In order to test the cartridge you have to compile the cartridge. Use the indicated settings and click the Submit button. You will be asked to save a file (FirstAdventure.gwc) on your computer. Select a subdirectory that has no accented characters in the path (you can e.g. use c:\earwigo) and save the file.

I suggest you use the (as of 2015) brand new web based emulator Webwigo to test out the cartridge.

You can also install the older Groundspeak emulator but that takes more time because you will have to apply several fixes that the community has come up with to keep it alive. If you choose to use the Groundspeak emulator, use this information to install the Groundspeak emulator and try the cartridge.

Changing the cartridge (Edit)

To have a look at the cartridge, select “FirstAdventure” from the Select cartridge box and then choose Edit as the operation. Click Submit to start the cartridge editor.

Editing the cartridge

This Edit Cartridge screen is probably where you'll spend most of your time in Earwigo. Have a look at the cartridge and try to modify the cartridge to your needs.

Moving Zones

If you want to test the cartridge outdoors you will have to move the zones closer to your home location (or fly to Paris ).

Select the Zones tab

Select the map for Zone A.

Make sure that the option Drag is enabled

Drag the zones closer to your home.

Change Text

The cartridge is obviously not very interesting. You can do the following to make it more realistic (or fantastic).

Edit the Cartridge Description (your introduction)

Edit the Zones Description

Edit the Messages

Changing Events

LUA is an event driven language. Progress is made in the cartridge by linking events together. For your first cartridge I have done this for you. Each time your human player enters a zone an event will be triggered. This event displays the next zone, displays messages to the player or saves the cartridge at the end of the game.

I assume you will have some trouble to follow the program structure at the beginning. Try to do it this way:

open the tab labeled Zones and display the zone List

select Zone A Properties and have a look at the properties

open the Events tab for zone A

select the Enter event

You can see that the human player triggers some lua code (Statements) when he enters Zone A. The most important item in the small event list is the activation of Zone B. Have a look at the zone B events and see how one zone opens the next zone until the player reaches the final zone.

Try to insert your own little code snippets and see how things work out. It might help to read this LUA introduction from the tutorial.

Good Luck! and … if you need to learn more, have a look at the tutorial.